Esa-Pekka Salonen has written a new piece called Pollux, which Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Gustavo Dudamel will premiere at Walt Disney Concert Hall, April 13-15. The piece was co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, Gustavo Dudamel, Music and Artistic Director, and Barbican Centre, London. The LA Phil then takes Pollux on tour to Boston, Washington, DC, New York, London, and Paris from the end of April to the beginning of May. In addition to Salonen's 17-year relationship with the orchestra as their Music Director, leading to the opening of Disney Hall and the revitalisation of the orchestra as well as downtown LA, he now has a long-standing relationship with the LA Phil as a featured composer.

Salonen describes the composition process of Pollux: 'My material seemed to want to grow in two completely opposite directions. Finally, I realised that these very different musical identities (I had referred to them as brothers in my sketches) would not fit into one cohesive formal unit, a single piece. They simply couldn’t coexist. This made me think of the myth of the non-identical twins Castor and Pollux, who share half of their DNA but have some extreme phenotype differences, and experience dramatically different fates…My solution was to write two independent but genetically linked orchestral works. Pollux, slow and quite dark in expression, is the first of them. Castor, extroverted and mostly fast, will follow later'.

The LA Phil and Gustavo Dudamel's performance of Pollux on their tour in London is part of the Barbican Centre's season-long ‘Esa-Pekka Salonen Composer Focus.’ This London premiere is the last concert in the series, which has featured a huge variety of Salonen's symphonic, choral, and chamber works, in addition to the composer in conversation and a screening of a documentary about him. In London, as in LA, Boston, New York, and Paris, Pollux stands alongside Varèse's Amériques and Dmitri Shostakovich's fifth symphony. In DC, Pollux is paired with Beethoven's ninth.

This spring also marked the exciting conclusion of Salonen's three-year Composer-in-Residency at the New York Philharmonic, where he conducted a program of Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Beethoven. On June 8 the orchestra performs Salonen's Foreign Bodies, accompanied by the world premiere of a live video installation by Tal Rosner; Daníel Bjarnason’s Violin Concerto with Pekka Kuusisto, and Obsidian Tear, a dance work set to Salonen’s Nyx and Lachen verlernt, choreographed by Wayne McGregor and performed by members of the Boston Ballet. Foreign Bodies will allow the audience to mix with the musicians, who will give additional impromptu performances throughout the event. Obsidian Tear is also being revived this April-May at the Royal Ballet in London, where it was premiered.